FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION 'KAWASAKI - LIVE IN JAPAN - 02/07/89'released September 2003

In the summer of 1989 we flew out to Japan to do our first, and unbeknown to us at the time, only ever Japanese tour...

In the preceding year and a half, our lives had been turned upside down by the rather daunting and unexpected success of our debut album, The First Of A Million Kisses. Up until then our gigs had been in little pubs and the so-called alternative cabaret clubs that were popular at the time.
We hadn’t for a moment expected everything that was about to happen – after all, these were the days of the one-fingered synth-pop duo and the Stock, Aitken and Waterman conveyor-belt pop factory. We weren’t like a normal pop group, we were kind of oddball, jazzy, folky, hard to describe; we didn’t look like pop stars, didn’t feel like them, we weren’t trying to be them. Maybe we could have signed to some obscure independent label and made a lo-fi record of our waltzy tunes – we would have been delighted. So when the mighty RCA Records, home of Elvis, the king of rock ’n’ roll, signed us and let us make an album without a drum machine-programming producer, just the way we wanted, pure and simple, as we played it, it all seemed to good to be true.
Next thing, we stood watching in amazement as our first single, ‘Perfect’, was not only played on the radio but went into the charts. What was even more incredible, it went all the way up to Number One. We sold out theatres all over Britain and Europe, and everywhere we went journalists stuck microphones in front of our mouths to interview us, while photographers’ flash guns blinded our somewhat disbelieving eyes.
As we approached the time to record our second album, the pressure to follow up the success of the first mounted. We’d had all our lives to come up with The First Of A Million Kisses and there’d been no expectations whatsoever for it to sell in the quantities that it did, but the new record had to be written in a fraction of the time and was following the success of a multi-million-selling, double-Brit award-winner. As we got closer to the deadline of September, we had introduced eight new songs into the set and the audience’s positive reaction gave us cause to be confident.
This CD is a recording of one of our last gigs, a show we did in Kawasaki, equidistant between Nagoya and Tokyo, a city made famous by its motorbikes. It was July 2nd, halfway through the Japanese tour, which was to be the band’s final outing. A month or so later, back in England, we imploded on the third day of recording our ill-fated second album.
I suppose the pressure just got to be too much in the end.
I went on to record the new songs, with our good friend Brian Kennedy on vocals, under the name of Sweetmouth. Roy and Simon carried on being much in demand both individually and together as a rhythm section and Eddi launched her career as a solo artist.
Besides live versions of three of our singles, ‘Perfect’, ‘Find My Love’ and ‘Clare’, plus four other songs from The First Of A Million Kisses album, this concert is the only recording of Fairground Attraction playing most of what would have been our second album. It is, I think, also a great little piece of frozen time. Eddi was at her exuberant best, running the length and breadth of the stage, spinning like a whirling dervish, grinning from ear to ear and singing like a happy angel. All of us were having a marvellous night. No matter how serious things had started to seem backstage, on stage when the lights went down we might as well have been back at the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross where we started, a bunch of mates doing what we loved to do most of all, play music.

'this is my life now, this is my story, this is the man that I've become, a saint and a sinner, a loser and winner, it was me who did the things I've done, but now I'm looking through the eyes of love... the mighty dove

The Mighty Dove is my second and latest solo album. Eleven songs recorded mostly at my studio 'raresong recorders' with the help of engineer and co-producer Dave Dix. It seemed fated that Dave and I would finally work together. Way back in 1987 when Fairground Attraction had just formed, we nearly signed with Phonogram Records. However, one of the conditions was that we would be allowed to produce the album ourselves.
Phonogram A & R man Alan Pell agreed to this but just before we signed he told us "I want Dave Dix to produce the album", we bombed over to RCA and signed there instead. It was nothing against Dave, he had just had a massive hit with Blacks 'Wonderful Life' and we hadn't even met him, it was just that we knew exactly what we wanted and didn't want anyone messing with it.

Then last year I met Dave for the first time at The Kashmir Klub in London, he, strangely enough had just finished work on Eddi Readers album 'Simple Soul' and I asked him to get involved in my new record too. Funny how things come around like that. We started recording on January the 2nd 2001, Roy Dodds, Simon Edwards, Roger Beaujolais and myself set up in the cosy confines of Raresong's West London basement studio and in a couple of weeks had all the basic tracks down. Dave transferred everything from 2 inch analogue tape over into Protools on the computer and we spent the next months overdubbing and fine tuning. One particular thrill was having the great Ian Mclagan come into to do a day of Hammond organ and piano overdubs. I loved 'Macs' playing on the Small Faces and particularly on The Faces records. Anytime I've ever worked with a keyboard player I would always say 'Can you play it like Ian Mclagan from The Faces?", imagine how I cringed when now, with the master himself at my disposal I heard the words "Can you play it like Danny Federici from The E Street Band?" coming out of my mouth. I back peddled frantically and spent the rest of the day just saying "Wow, Amazing" to everything he played, which of course, it was.
Right at the end of it all we took the tapes over to Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin where Fiachra Trench had done some awesome string arrangements for five of the tracks. He conducted a 22 piece Irish Film Orchestra while Dave and I grinned humbly at the majesty of his arrangements. It was St Patrick's day carnival weekend in the great city and the breathtaking firework display that was the climax of the evening seemed to be a celebration of the end of our recording. The Mighty Dove is eleven songs inspired by the events of the last few years of my life. A time of endings and beginnings, loss and redemption, hurt and forgiveness, it is dedicated with love to my friends and family, absent, present and yet to be.

Mojo Magazine '...beautifully understated album confirms he remains an astonishingly accomplished songsmith..the elegant simplicity of Nevin's songs is beguiling..inspired..graceful..vulnerable..they will certainly make your life a better place.

Q Magazine '...graceful songs which teeter teeth-gnashingly on the edge of sex'

On June the 28th 1999 I released my album 'insensitive songwriter'. For a long time I had been writing songs for other people but had always wanted to make a record where I sang my own stuff - well here it is.

A couple of years before the album I found myself at a place in life where it just started to seem absurd to write a song and then let someone else sing it, it was my story so why let some-one else tell it? My dad was welsh and a real church singer, Ave Maria and Danny Boy were his favourite songs, I grew up hearing his Mario Lanza and Nat King Cole records on sunday mornings and remember his disgust at the 'yobbos' on Top Of The Pops, "That's not singing!" he used to bark.

Well I am more of a yobbo than a Mario Lanza and it took me a while to be able to stand in front of a microphone without hearing his voice echoing around my head. I called Mike Finesilver at Pathway Studios in Islington and booked a couple of hours studio time. Mike wrote the sixties classic 'Fire' when he was in 'The Crazy World of Arthur Brown'. With the royalties he bought the little shed like building that became Pathway Studios. Since closed down it was a great place with a damp smell that clung to your clothes for a couple of washes. Elvis Costello recorded 'My Aim is True' there, and all sorts of people like The Police and The Damned used it in the heyday of new wave. I first went there years ago with Kirsty MacColl, it was one of my first recording sessions. We did a demo of 'You Broke My Heart in 17 Places (Shepherd Bush Was Only One)' a song that later became the title track of Tracy Ullmans first album.
Anyway, I explained to Mike that I was very nervous about singing in front of anyone and he assured me that engineer Jim Custance was cool, which he was, so with the lights off I recorded guitar and vocal versions of about 13 songs. The next time I kept the lights on and little by little I began to feel more comfortable about the whole thing. I gradually brought in other musicians and before long I had so many people playing with me we had to go to a bigger studio. It all got a bit out of hand, there were 27 people playing on some of the tracks.

A year later I had finished an 'epic' record, it sounded huge but frankly it was over the top, by the time you got to the end of it you needed a lie down, it was exhausting. I decided I needed some help from a production point of view and called Stephen Lipson to ask him if he would produce a track for me, I was stunned when he agreed, after all he was used to producing all sorts of superstars like Annie Lennox, Cher and Whitney Houston. His state of the art Aquarium Studios in Willesden was a small city of tiny lights. We did a great version of 'Queen Of Angels' and at last things were really shaping up. However, the rest of what I had recorded now seemed obsolete so I had to scrap it and start again. I called my old Fairground Attraction buddies Roy Dodds and Roger Beaujolais, who in turn brought in bass player Julian Crampton. We headed back to Pathway and in four days recorded the rest of the songs that made up the album. It was back to basics, we didn't let ourselves use any studio effects or overdubs, we just recorded what was played in the room. With the help of Liam Watson who, with his Brian Wilson haircut and priceless collection of vintage valve microphones could have been from another time altogether. He was the antithesis of Mr Lipson. Finally we took the tapes over to Rafe McKenna at Roundhouse Studios where he mixed it.

'Words and music strung together won't make love last forever, so goodbye to songtown'

In the aftermath of the Fairground Attraction break up I was lost as to how to carry on. I had written 9 new songs for what would have been our second album but had no-one to sing them. Brian Kennedy had come to our attention when someone at RCA asked us if he could support us on what was to be our last British tour. We were struck by his beautiful voice and during the course of the tour he become a great friend.

On the night that my son Wesley was born (7th of November 1990) I met up with a bunch of people at The Sir Richard Steeles pub in Belsize Park to celebrate his birth. Brian was one of them and I asked him if he would like to get involved in what became the 'Sweetmouth' project. He said yes and we began straight away rehearsing the songs to start recording at the start of 1991. With Simon Edwards on bass, Martin Ditcham on drums and Graham Henderson on keyboards, we spent about 6 weeks at Angel Studios in Islington, North London making the album. It was the time of the Gulf War and we watched the American planes taking off on CNN on the TV above the mixing desk ('Oh my God is this going to be the end of the world?' we wondered).
One of the most enjoyable parts of making the record was meeting and working with the brilliant string arranger Fiachra Trench, especially on the albums last song 'Broken By A Breeze' which features Brian singing with nine string players orchestrated by Fiachra in a kind of 'Over The Rainbow' way.
While the record was no great commercial success there was enough of a demand for RCA to re-release it 'due to popular demand' at the end of the nineties. I often get e-mails from people who really love it, especially the first song 'Dangerous'.